Faith and family are two important themes in her work, as they are in her life: “My own lonely childhood is very likely the reason why family is so important to me-my own present family of children and grandchildren and the families in my stories.” “I still get books out of it? Indeed, her awkward, intense, oddly brilliant heroines are not unlike the author’s descriptions of herself.
“It was absolutely splendidly horrible,” she writes. She created her own world as an escape and a solace, which was especially important during a series of painful school experiences-first at a “really repulsive New York-type school,” where she was labeled “the unpopular one,” then at a boarding school in England, where she was sent after her father’s ill health forced the family to relocate to the Swiss Alps. L’Engle says she felt very loved by her parents but completely apart from their world. Her father had been gassed during a stint as a war correspondent during the First World War and subsequently “spent eighteen years coughing his life away.” Her mother spent most of l’Engle’s childhood caring for her failing father. L’Engle led an isolated, if somewhat romantic, existence as the only child of sophisticated, older parents. “All about a little ‘grul,’” she says, “who lived in a cloud,” something that could be said of many of her time-traveling, space-bending, star-talking protagonists in the books she would write as an adult.
L’Engle began the struggle early, writing her first story at age six. It is from these struggles that her work derives, and it has been a fruitful struggle: nearly twenty books for children and nineteen for adults, including essays, poetry, fiction, and two plays.
She has also struggled to place herself in time, both in Kronos-eternal time, in which God moves- and Chairos, “clock time,” in which man lives. John the Divine (Episcopal) in New York City through the lows of her “dry decade,” when nothing she wrote was accepted for publication, and the wrenching agony of watching her beloved husband of forty years die from cancer, L’Engle has struggled with her often conflicting roles of wife, mother, artist, and Christian. From the high points of winning the Newbery Medal for A Wrinkle in Time (1962), garnering a Newbery Honor mention for A Ring of Endless Light (1980), and obtaining her current position as writer in residence at the Cathedral of St. Madeleine L’Engle’s life is as interesting and inspiring as her books-if not more so.
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